The director of Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab has departed

Baidu teamed up with Asia Mobility Industries to launch a new Singapore-based mobility venture fund, called 'Apollo Southeast Asia.'.

Adam Coates, director of Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab, has left the company, according to a recent LinkedIn update from Coates. Coates joined the Chinese search giant back in May of 2014 to lead a California-based team of 50 machine learning developers.

Baidu has built up an established proficiency in natural language processing. While at Baidu, Coates publicly evangelized Baidu's machine learning efforts and worked directly on applying deep learning to core NLP problems like text to speech and speech recognition.

Since departing, Ng has been investing time and resources into a troika of businesses. Thus far he has announced a new deep learning course. We also reported on a new AI fund filed with the SEC in Ng's name last month.

Ng's departure was widely reported given his high profile role within the company. Baidu has been investing heavily into its Sunnyvale office as a pipeline for acquiring top U.S. machine learning talent. In an interview with Wired last month, Qi Lu, Baidu's chief operating officer explicitly noted that while China's AI talent pool is growing rapidly, the U.S. is still the global leader.

Baidu declined to comment when asked about the departure.

We have also reached out to Coates. We will update this post if we hear information on who will be taking the reigns at Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab or what Coates' plans are for the future.